iPhone vs. Android: A Picture’s Worth a Thousand Words

We hear a lot about how Android is trouncing Apple in marketshare. I’m not doubting the numbers, but I’ve long wondered what these people are doing with their phones.

One of the most telling metrics for actual usage is photography. Flickr remains the standard for this measurement, and I’ve collected below some fascinating data on usage between iPhone and Android I tripped over tonight while looking up the most popular DSLR (it’s Canon, btw).

Just the #2 device from Apple (the iPhone 5) had 6,930 users upload photos yesterday

Ok, so let’s get silly with it: here’s the average number of users per day for all five top Samsung phones vs. just the iPhone 5:

Samsung top 5: 2743 daily users

iPhone 5 alone: 5856 daily users

That’s over double, for just the iPhone 5. And the 4S is still even more used than the iPhone 5–with 6430 average daily users. Remarkably, the original iPhone 4 still has 4,356 daily users, and that thing has like a 37 pixel camera. Not megapixels…pixels.

So I ask again–what good is marketshare if people aren’t using their phones? This, folks, is why so many dev shops develop for iPhone first. Companies don’t care how many potential install devices there are: they care about how many people are likely to actually use their apps.

Apple is still slaying in that category, and thus is still winning overall.